But these images of Pruitt-Igou occupy a far less permanent place in culture than images of the destruction of Pruitt-Igou, an event that-though commentators have used it to draw various political conclusions-has generally increased Americans’ fear of the kind of high-density skyscrapers that are now so common in wealthy East Asian cities. Why was there a public housing mandate in St. Louis that spawned people like Pruitt-Igow in the first place? In the late 1940s, when the growth of American cities seemed unstoppable, officials predicted that the population would be several million by 1970, requiring aggressive slum clearance and high-density urban renewal. As a result, frightened white residents fled, and the entire Pruitt-Igow became an all-black residential area. Many black residents also moved to the suburbs, reducing the number of residents in Pruitt-Igoe to those who simply had nowhere to live. Pruitt-Igoe became synonymous with a dysfunctional urban sinkhole that Americans of modest means thought they could get away with if they left the cities during the decades of white flight after World War II. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis soon after completion in 1956. It took a deliberate and well-planned act of terror to destroy this feat of architectural modernism as Pruitt-Igoe came to its end in a perfect storm of 20th century economic, demographic and political urban disasters. But while Pruitt-Igoe was long and agonizingly demolished in the early 1970s, Yamasaki’s much more iconic work opened its doors: the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Those who read the Pruitt-Igoe story as a moral play on 20th-century architectural arrogance tend to laugh at Yamasakis’s project as an award winner, even though “he” won none. Captain WO Pruitt Homes and William L Igoe Apartments, a 33-story, 11-bay racially segregated middle-class tower complex, opened with great pomp in 1954-1956 in north St. Louis. If you propose a major public housing project in America, your opponents will almost certainly use Pruitt-Igoe as a rhetorical weapon against you–and defeat you in the process. A Japanese-American architect was commissioned to design a federally-funded public housing project under the Housing Act of 1949, and “he” initially proposed a group of mixed-use buildings. Even today, when our eyes must get used to all sorts of developments that should shock us with their incongruity, aerial shots of the Pruitt-Igoe complex make us roll our eyes. I never thought people could be so destructive, Yamasaki told Architectural Review, lamenting the vandalism that hit Pruitt-Igoe in the 1960s. The year before Pruitt-Igow was completely demolished, J.G. Ballard published “his” novel High Rise, which tells the story of an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood in London that almost immediately turns into a violent bacchanalia.